forms
of children's service in the home which have come under your
observation.

3. What forms of community service can be done by children and by
young people?

4. Recall any lessons learned by activity in your early home life.

5. Give in their order, according to your judgment, the potencies
for religious character in the home.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] A short list of books on child activity in the home is appended at
the end of this chapter; a fairly complete list, long enough for any
family, will be found on p. 117 of _The Church School_, by W.S. Athearn.

[13] See W.N. Hutchins, _Graded Social Service for the Sunday School_.

CHAPTER VIII

THE HOME AS A SCHOOL[14]

The home is so mighty as a school because, requiring little time for
formal instruction, it enlists its scholars so largely in informal
activities. It trains for life by living; it trains as an institution,
by a group of activities, a series of duties, a set of habits. If the
home is to prepare for social living it will be most of all and best of
all by its organization and conduct as a social institution.

Sec. 1. AN IDEAL COMMUNITY

For the purposes of society homes must be social-training centers; they
must be conducted as communities if their members are to be fitted for
communal living. No boy is likely to be ready for the responsibilities
of free citizenship who has spent his years in a home under an absolute
monarchy; or, as is today perhaps more frequently the case, in a
condition of unmitigated anarchy. A free society cannot consist of units
not free. The problems of parental discipline arise and appear as
persistently irritating and perplexing stumbling-blocks in many a home
simply because that home is organized altogether out of harmony and
relation with the normal life in which it is set. Society environing the
home gives its members the habits of twentieth-century autonomy,
individual initiative and responsibility, together with collective
living and working, while the home often seeks to perpetuate
thirteenth-century absolutism, serfdom, and subjection. In social living
outside the home we learn to do the will of all; in the home we attempt
to compel children to do the will of one.

Sec. 2. COMMUNITY INTERESTS

The home organized as a social community will give to every member,
according to his ability, a share in its guidance and will expect from
every member the free contribution